Excel : Java Glossary

Microsoft’s popular spreadsheet for Windows. It can import and export CSV files. Its native binary format is *.xls. There are tools to read and write Excel format spreadsheets in
Java. In the late 1990s,
I worked for David Pollack’s Athena on an Excel-compatible spreadsheet called
Integer. It allowed many users to remotely
collaborate on the same sheet. It could run on any machine, even servers and display
on many machines. Unlike regular Excel, it exploited as many
CPUs (Central Processing Units)
as you could throw at it. Unfortunately, the project ran out of money just as it was
beginning to catch on. In 2006, it came back to life.

The easiest way to exchange data with Excel is via CSV (Comma-Separated Value)
files. To generate spreadsheet files with embedded formulae, you will need POI.